Czechoslovakia straddled a line that divided west from east since prehistoric times. The two great European ice caps met at the Morava. The river marked the limes, or the limit, of the Roman Empire. Centurions stared across its water into the unknown dark forests and feared barbarians. From its opposite bank Vandals would swarm on their way to sack Rome. It formed an eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire; Christianity would be severed along its length and two world wars ignite at the fissure of Europe. Here too, give or take a hundred miles, communism confronted capitalism.
In Prague it was said that the Morava, which divided the Czech lands from Slovakia, separated Europe from Asia. Across the river, it was said, men and women do not touch when they dance. Slovak obscenities are based on defecation while Czechs profane fornication. They are not like us, it was said. But no Slovak would have accepted that Europe ends at the Morava. Invariably it ended just a few miles to the east. It was always just down the road.
The Trabant, its engine panting, strained up into the Carpathians, the great horseshoe sweep of mountains that embraces eastern Europe. A queue of Škodas and heavy Soviet lorries trailed behind us. We had left the city where the sewers run with jewels, the blind collect the past, and the clocks strike noon at eleven for Slovakia but had paused at Austerlitz before crossing the Morava. There Zita had developed a headache.
“How do you feel?”
“Lousy.” She had swallowed some aspirin. “The trouble is it’s a terrible sort of roundabout. You take the pills to take the pain away but the pills make you sick. It’s a hopeless mix-up.”
There had been nothing to see at Austerlitz. No monument recalled the heroism of Archduke Decimus. His deeds were not recorded in any book but consigned to the family memory.
The Battle of Three Emperors was Napoleon’s greatest victory. His sixty-eight thousand troops defeated a combined force of ninety thousand Austrians and Russians. The battle had been a tactical masterpiece. It drove the Czar back to Moscow and forced the Hapsburgs to suspend hostilities.
Decimus had conspired to deny Napoleon victory. But the Austrian Emperor spurned his advice. Francis the First retorted, “Ohren sind zum Hören,” and, in a fusillade of guffaws, rode nine thousand men to death. Decimus refused to join the suicidal attack on the French right. Instead he led his small corps on a harebrained assault at the enemy’s main force. He had inherited his father’s courage but not his brains. The Grande Armée easily overpowered him. “Feuilles de chou est fou,” mocked the captors. Napoleon had ordered that prisoners and the wounded be bayoneted. It wasn’t Decimus’s day. But Marshal Soult, a romantic impressed by acts of quixotic heroism, secretly had Decimus escorted home in time for supper. By nightfall, as he finished his knedliky dumplings, the French had counter-attacked and the allied army ceased to exist.
* * *
“Slovakia is beautiful but the Communists have left nothing,” said the petrol attendant, his eyes the color of walnut. Peasants with broad Slav foreheads and high cheekbones squatted in their fields. The men were tired, resigned, and bereft of hope. Every woman looked ready to cry. Above them towered heroic statues, poised in defense of the homeland, which portrayed, ironically, the broken people. There had once been little difference between Czechs and Slovaks. Together they had created the first organized states in eastern Europe. But the Magyars, whose horsemen raided as far west as Nimes and Champagne, divided them in one of the darkest periods of European history. Fascists and Communists deepened the division. Slovakia had never recovered.
In the villages the ubiquitous factory chimney had replaced the steeple as the center of town. A cement works dusted lime on the road, the houses, a cyclist’s hair. Heavy industry belched smoke. Byzantine onion domes deteriorated into red rust.
“I walked this way,” said Zita, but I didn’t believe her.
At the start of the last war the family had escaped from Brno to Banská Bystrica. Hitler had annexed the Czech lands and it was dangerous for them to stay in Moravia. Slovakia, a puppet state, was an island of prosperity and stability in war-torn Europe. Here at the foot of their mountain they would be safer. But my great-uncle knew Zita, his youngest, would be safest in Switzerland and sent her to Aunt Osyth.
Osyth was not overjoyed to see her niece. She had never forgiven Zita’s father for his betrayal and was jealous of the blossoming fourteen-year-old beauty. In any event she had a new husband who was a wealthy banker with wandering hands. History would not be allowed to repeat itself. So while Hitler’s panzers blitzed westward across Europe, Zita was packed off back east to Moravia.
She arrived at the family home in Brno to find the family gone. The old housekeeper, terrified more of the neighbors than the Nazis, wouldn’t let her stay. She gave her two loaves of maisbrot, the precious last sausage, and showed her the door. Zita walked for forty-two days across Moravia to Slovakia, traveling at night and sleeping in barns by day.
“I was as filthy as an old cow and I reeked like a Gypsy,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a pretty picture.”
Oto, her brother, was the first to see her. He didn’t recognize her. “Aus dem Weg, Zigeuner!” he had barked. “It’s me, you great oaf,” she replied.
Her arrival distressed her father. Few virgins survived the war intact. He hadn’t raised and educated her only to have her violated by a lice-ridden soldier in a hayloft. He had her spirited into the mountains to live among people whom he trusted. She ran errands for the partisans. Her virginity only just survived the hostilities. The day peace dawned she lost it to her future husband — and to Lenin.
The light was crisp, the air clear, and snow still clung to the hills as we drove into Banská Bystrica, the heart of Slovakia. The fronts of the buildings on the main square were newly painted, as they were every five years, in preparation for Liberation Day. Vermilion banners lined the avenues. But behind the facades the substance crumbled. Zita failed to recognize the house even when we drew up outside it. Her memory was stuck like a needle skipping in the groove of a long-playing record. She refused to remember the building because it was filthy, the stairs because the paint had peeled, and the apartment because the furniture had been rearranged. It was as if she did not want the memory to age. The intensity of emotion had frozen it in time. Yet it was here, in this once grand residence, that she arrived filthy and smelling after her trek.
The bell was broken and the door unlocked. The apartment smelled of last year’s apples. We followed the sound of Russian voices through the meandrine rooms, past clutters of unworn clothes and unmade beds, dusty pianos, and photographs of ice hockey teams. In the thirteenth room, the allegory in Slovak fairy tales for that which is hidden, were Pavel and Marta. She worked at her sewing machine. He watched two Baltik televisions simultaneously. One provided sound, the other picture, and both were tuned to Moscow.
“The door was open,” apologized Zita.
Pavel leapt up and circled the room in sharp, quick steps as if he were about to break into a run. He had been expecting us. Marta hadn’t. He’d forgotten to mention our telegram, which he pulled from his pocket.
“Godfathers,” he exclaimed.
“My family,” Marta said and embraced Zita as if she’d last seen her second cousin only the week before. She immediately set about preparing a banquet. Her effort caused Pavel — whose temper was as short as his stride — to burst into fiery criticism. She basked in his assault and withdrew smiling under the barrage of insults. They hadn’t had visitors in over twenty years.
“Why my wife cook all this I don’t know.” When, remarkably, he left us alone, Marta shook her head. “He was once such a man. Now he only sits watching television and I do all the work.”
“Dinner, please,” Pavel announced as he returned from the larder with apples, pungent with sweet decay. Marta served kapustnica, a cabbage stew the color of paprika, thick with cumin-spiced sausages and sour cream. I was intrigued by the television. Banská Bystrica lay 140 miles from the Soviet border, beyond normal broadcast range.
“Áno, áno,” said Pavel. Yes, yes. “This is very nice.” He laughed. “I build top aerial on roof, áno? Eleven meters tall. To see Österreichische Rundfunk. For day one, life was wonderful. The world in our house come.” His highly directional antennae picked up Austrian Television. “Then a great wind from the west comes, áno? Good-bye, Vienna. Hello, Moscow. Fantastické.”
The aerial had been blown 180 degrees in the opposite direction and stuck. The winds had made the precarious mast too dangerous to climb. They were condemned to receive only Soviet television and worse still, only one channel of it, until a favorable wind blew from the east. “Fantastické, áno?”
Marta leaned across the table with my serving of halušky, potato gnocchi with grated cheese, and whispered, “You must marry a Slovak; a girl who can make dumplings.”
But Vera had grown weary of the chat. “We’ve not come to marry him off. We’re here to bury my husband.”
We slept poorly with Winston at our feet and Mirek in the hall leaning against the larder. Woodworms gnawed all night in the paneling behind our heads. There was no heating.
“Breakfast, please,” said Pavel. “I’m sorry but I must go. What can I do? The system in the world is very bad. We must work.”
The sisters were arranging the funeral. I had the day free and asked to join him.
“I cannot waiting you breakfast, áno?” I made excuses to Marta. She packed a sandwich to tide me over until lunch.
We rode a bus that bent like an accordion. In the school yard Pavel counted from one to five, paused, then counted back again. Boys stood in two ragged lines. One line held foam balls at arm’s length. They bobbed up and down five times, then rolled the balls to the other line, who repeated the action. The numbing routine was varied only by an occasional bounce of the ball. But the boys didn’t mind, it was preferable to clearing weeds from railway lines or sweeping the pavement outside their school. This was “the progressive tradition of physical education founded on a scientific base in the process of developing the socialist principles of physical education.”
In Czechoslovakia no child owned a baseball bat or football boots. There were no class teams. School sport was limited to calisthenics. Children were forbidden either to compete or to excel; individual skills were suppressed.
The tall boy was to jump only as far as the short boy and no further. The leveling extended beyond the playground. Physical and academic education were rated equally, so the brainy child who could not run was held back. His marks, once averaged, fell. All because he was never told that he was special. Pavel was their gym teacher, but once he had been a coach of the Czech national hockey team.
In 1968 half a million soldiers invaded Czechoslovakia. The Party Leader, Alexander Dubcek, was kidnapped, drugged, and forced to sign the Moscow Protocol. The country was intimidated but it did not capitulate. The Russians needed an excuse to nail the coffin shut. It came several months later. The Czech ice hockey team beat the Soviets at the world championships in Stockholm. Spontaneous celebrations erupted across the country. Czechs and Slovaks rejoiced in Wenceslas Square, the Aeroflot office was burned out, and police stood idly by as Soviet troops were ridiculed by the crowds.
The Kremlin denounced the acts of “counter-revolution.” The victory undermined the socialist principles of fraternal sport; that is to say the Russians had lost. More Red Army spoilsports entered Czechoslovakia. Dubcek, who had sent a congratulatory telegram to the team, was expelled from post and party. Ten thousand Czech officers were axed, one hundred thousand people fled the country, half a million men and women — like Pavel and Brno’s historian — were forced to leave their jobs for manual labor. In the school yard Pavel continued to count from one to five and back again.
Overnight he was denied ambition and the loss of challenge destroyed him. He lost the courage to be curious and retreated into a world of routine and cynicism. The apartment became a place of sanctuary: for the family in 1940, for Pavel and Marta in 1969. Slovakia was a good place to hide.
After making arrangements for the next day the sisters had spent the afternoon arguing in the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, a building shaped like a severed and distorted globe. The collection was undergoing what was euphemistically called “historical renewal.” The Uprising, a failed attempt to expel the Germans in 1944, occupied the heart of the country’s postwar mythology. Its failure and subsequent veneration were acts of blatant hypocrisy. Now the lies were being corrected and display cases had been opened, texts amended, retouched photographs restored. But Vera remained unhappy with the revision — the past remained a matter of interpretation — and she stormed out in a fury. Zita admitted that she couldn’t remember. She was having trouble with the facts. Had she actually forgotten or was she simply refusing to accept them?
Marta emerged from the kitchen with supper: smoked pork, sauerkraut, and dumplings that were dense like a steamed white loaf. Apricot compote was served with the meat.
“What’s truer: memoirs or memories?” Zita was irritated with herself. “Bloody hell, I know,” she clutched at a straw, “the phonograph. You know, with those wax cylinders.”
“The Edison,” specified Vera.
“Oto and I used it. We recorded our voices during the war.”
“Áno,” confirmed Pavel. “Where it now is I do not know. I am sorry.”
“It is in the thirteenth room,” said Marta.
“We look, please,” said Pavel.
“But the dinner will get cold.”
Beyond the thirteenth room lay another thirteenth room. The house revealed itself like an onion peeled, layer within layer. It was filled with furniture and cobwebs. We descended into the clutter of ages. Vera found a dusty crystal perfume bottle, over a foot high, in the shape of the Kremlin.
“Not that bloody thing.” After the war a Soviet delegation had called on their father bearing gifts. “We had to entertain the bastards,” hissed Vera.
“They seemed very nice,” said her sister.
The delegation had come to buy their father’s mine. He thanked them and explained that he had no intention of selling. They suggested that it was in his interest to accept their offer. He was, after all, a German.
Vaclav objected furiously. His forefathers may have been Austrian, but he was a Czech. His family had lived in Moravia for generations.
“They finished dinner,” explained Zita. “I’d been serving. I knew after dinner you should drink brandy. So I found this old bottle. I filled each glass — those big snifters — full to the brim. My father nearly had a heart attack. His best bloody cognac.”
“It wasn’t the brandy.”
“The Russians loved it. They were carried away, eventually, by their drivers. My father had to be carried upstairs.” Vaclav didn’t sell. The mine was requisitioned a year later.
“Here is,” said Pavel.
A stack of grimy canvases, romantic harvest scenes in gilt frames, hid the phonograph. Zita dragged it into the open. It left a trail like a snail in the dust. She unhooked its wooden dome to reveal the finely tooled black and silver works. The great brass horn slipped onto the reproducer head. “Edison Records Echo All Over the World.” His signature was etched in gold-leaf.
“Where are the cylinders?”
“Behind the curtain,” announced Marta as she brought in our plates.
“Oto looked fearless in his uniform,” said Zita and opened the sleeves of heavy cardboard. The black wax had discolored to cloudy white, but somewhere in their minute grooves slept her brother’s voice. She wound the clockwork motor, slipped the first cylinder over the barrel, set the needle, and released the brake.
Don Giovanni crackled hollowly up the horn. “Not bloody Mozart,” objected Zita and removed it. The next cylinder replayed a pious sermon. An English-language course followed: “Does she go to church every morning whilst in Florence? Yes, she goes every morning with Aunt.”
Vera found more cylinders. Zita rewound the spring, replaced the needle, and tried again. Edvard Beneš, the President deposed by the Communists, had been recorded as he spoke to the Senate, “... Our state is the key to the whole postwar structure of central Europe. If it is touched...” The needle skipped. Zita grew exasperated. “Where the ruddy hell is he?”
“Wenn alle untreu werden, So bleiben wir doch treu...” It was Oto. “... Dass immer noch auf Erden, Für Euch ein Fähnlein sei.”
“What the bloody hell’s that racket?” she demanded.
“Our illustrious brother singing.”
“When all become disloyal, Then we remain loyal, So that always upon this earth, There may be a banner in front of you...”
“He always took himself too seriously,” Vera added.
“... Be proud I carry the flag, Have no cares I carry the flag, Love me I carry the flag.”
“It doesn’t sound anything like him.” Zita turned to Vera. “What’s he singing?” A girl’s voice accompanied the song. “And who’s the warbler?”
“It’s you, you’re singing the SS song together,” she replied. Vera laughed the sort of laugh lovers make when confessing to infidelity. “A Communist as a fiancé and a fascist for a brother, I don’t know how you resolved that one.”
“And bloody you as a sister; that was the bugger in the woodpile. Oto was no fascist. He was an ordinary soldier, and handsome to boot.” But it wasn’t true.
“Ordinary soldiers didn’t volunteer for the SS.” But they did.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Zita’s voice was shrill. “Oto had no choice.” She held her throat as if to strangle herself.
Pavel looked up from his chop. “Áno.”
“Eat, please,” announced Pavel shortly after dawn. Marta had been up for hours to bake filo pastry and stuff it with stewed apples. She didn’t want us to go hungry during our day in the Tatras. Pavel fretted at the head of the stairs. “Come, please.” The borrowed car had arrived.
The Volga was as wide as the river. I sat high in the back like a member of the Politburo, the pig on my lap and the sisters at my side. Mirek was strapped to the roof. They wanted him to travel the last leg of his journey in style.
Pavel and Marta sat in front with the driver. In her thick black coat and woolen cap, she seemed an unlikely Senior Inspector for Silniční a Mostní Konstrukce, Státní Podnik — the State Enterprise for Road and Bridge Construction. She spoke of her roads with pride.
“I built this one in 1973. The asphalt is Albanian.” She didn’t rate local materials. “If only we could get Trinidad tarmac then we could build something special. It’s the best in the world.” She knew the details of all the industry along her roads. “Here’s our toilet paper factory.” The car passed a vast works of railway lines and grimy shattered windows. Scruffy children played with a puppy by the gates. “The original machinery was replaced in 1980.”
Pavel had less enthusiasm for the march of industry. “We are happy with our cement works. We could have had ball-bearing factory. Fantastické.”
As we climbed, a purple mist of crocuses blanketed the brown winter grass. The soil became darker, almost black, like the faces of Gypsies. The lines of hills dissolved into the horizon and the farthest range became indistinguishable from a bank of clouds. The Volga berthed outside a tiny Minorite church. Skeletal crosses, canted at weird angles, stabbed the barren mound like pins piercing a voodoo doll. News of our arrival had preceded us and a small curious crowd had gathered. The broad lined faces of old women stared from under dark head scarfs and whispered. A journalist, who only months before had worked for the StB, took photographs. Zita was relieved that she had dressed for the funeral. A veil was draped from her skunk busby. Her long skirt was split to the thigh; not particularly respectful, but at least it was black.
“I had the courtesy not to wear red,” she answered Vera’s glare, “or my Party badge.”
Father Raphael read the rites. The blow of a hammer sealed the coffin, a sudden noise in the silent chapel. An old man, his tear-stained face unknown to us, carried the flowers upside down and led the mourners to the grave. The cemetery seemed airless. The pallbearers gasped for breath.
Winston, wearing a black bow, trotted off for a rout. Zita watched him go with mixed emotions. She had come to hate pigs in these hills. She jabbed me in the ribs and pointed across the uplands.
“That’s where I met your uncle.”
Zita’s task in the war was to bring food to the partisans. The work bored her. She didn’t mind the solitary walk secreting milk and eggs to the mountain hideouts, but all too often her charges were live pigs. The suilline chores heightened her sense of betrayal. She wanted to wear a silk dress and waltz with an officer in Vienna, not drag a pig on a rope up a hill in Slovakia. Oto would have rescued her but he was stationed in Poland and the partisan officers didn’t go dancing much after the collapse of the Uprising. Those who hadn’t been captured by the Germans tended to contract tuberculosis or freeze to death. The pigs came to represent her sense of injustice. She prayed for salvation.
In the last months of the war Zita was asked to shepherd a particularly stubborn sow into the hills. She coaxed and cajoled it up the narrow alpine paths. Halfway up a steep incline the swine stopped and refused to move. Zita was cold, damp, and in no mood for melodramatics. Over her shoulder she carried a satchel full of newly picked crocuses. She thrust it, flowers and all, over the pig’s head and started to push.
But the sow, unlike every other pig she had hooded, panicked. It was spring, the earth was slippery, and both lost their footing. They rolled, screaming and squealing, crocuses flying, into a gully. Zita was pinned under the beast. She couldn’t breathe. She beat its flanks but to no avail. She began to suffocate. A shot rang out and the sow collapsed dead. Zita’s last sight before she passed out was of an officer towering above her, a red star on his shapka.
The officer, my future uncle, saw below him a radiant beauty, wreathed in flowers, dying under a pig. He holstered his revolver, pushed the carcass aside, and noticed that Zita’s ears didn’t match. He who loved people for their flaws, whose job it was to exploit weakness, lost his heart.
Zita awoke to find herself being kissed; at least, that was the story she told in later life. At the time Peter was giving her artificial respiration. She scrambled away from him. He apologized in fluent Slovak.
“I am sorry. I thought you were being attacked. I thought that the pig was a man.”
Zita was disorientated. “Where’s my sow?” she asked in German.
“I have killed it.” His German was without accent. His eyes were the color of teak. Zita saw the red star, the Lenin badge, the dead pig, and knew her salvation had come. The die was cast and the first arc of the circle of their lives prescribed.
Peter hadn’t told me about the Uprising; at least not this uprising. The story he did tell me behind the garden gate was just that — a story. It was not the truth I had now discovered.
Slovakia had been allied with the German Reich. The puppet regime suppressed its people so brutally that there was no need for an occupation army. In late 1943 Communists and democrats, with the blessing of Moscow and London, joined forces to form a single resistance movement. The Slovak National Council, a body balanced between political left and right, was appointed to command the uprising and began to concentrate troops and supplies around Banská Bystrica.
Moscow then ordered its independent partisan units to attack Wehrmacht bases, road and rail bridges before the military preparations had been completed. They knew the resistance, caught only partially prepared, would lack the resources for a sustained fight. They succeeded in wrong-footing the uprising.
German forces marched into Slovakia to put down the insurgents. The Council was forced to act, but soon they needed help. The Red Army, only eighty miles away over the Carpathians, promised arms, diversionary attacks, and an airlift of the Czech Para Brigade, then under Soviet command, into Banská Bystrica. It failed to fulfill every promise. They sent no arms, they refused to allow the Americans to deliver the equipment made ready at Bari, and instead of ammunition their Ilyushins flew in agitators, political commissars, and Soviet partisan officers, my uncle among them, to ensure the destruction of the last organized defenders of Slovak democracy. Soviet High Command inflicted deliberate and irreparable damage to prevent the Slovaks from freeing themselves. They wanted to be the liberators and by such liberation to dominate the republic.
The insurgents fled into the mountains and the Germans razed one hundred villages in reprisal. They executed thousands and burned their victims alive in lime kilns. The leaders, all fifteen members of an American Military Mission, and two Associated Press correspondents were taken to Germany and shot. Both uprising and independence were crushed.
This was the reason Vera had chosen the site for Mirek’s final resting place. Every Czech and Slovak knew about betrayal, but no one could talk about it. The people had been forced to forget. They feared their memory, if given voice, might unleash demons beyond their control. But history cannot be buried like a body. Only by telling the truth about the past can fears about the future be overcome.
Where does Europe end? If Europe is the courage to defend the rights of man, does the continent end where fear begins? Are its borders fixed or, like the tide, subject to the pull between sun and moon, of inertia and valor? Courage pushes back the curtain of fear.
We lowered Mirek, his journey ended, into the grave.